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A terrific drawing of what I assume is my student, me and the fetal pig we dissected in lab.

You can’t understand how good this looks until you’ve spent nearly 2 months living in a field station. They gave us homemade blackberry juice for goodness sake.

Ice Skating in the Boston Commons

Sometimes you meet unexpected friends in the intertidal

Top: Hollis Jones inspects a coral skeleton. That muddy rock has been around for longer than human civilization. Bottom: Bill talks about the history of Bocas reefs and explains how we can use coral fossils to tell us about the natural world of the past. (photo credit: Janine Ledet)

Green sea turtle – not actually an illustration, this is a sand sculpture I made on a beach (one of my more bizarre artistic hobbies)

Lauren Josephs squirts fluorescein dye into the water column. By measuring the dye dispersal over a time-lapse video you can get an idea of water turbulence around coral reefs.

Basic diagram of the neurosecretory system of the American lobster, Homarus americanus. Edited from Skiebe 2001.

Map of the 11 sites surveyed in the Gulf of Maine

Reef research underway

Even the fetal pig thinks I am a good TA! Thats all the gratification I need….

Moose looks on as I filter water samples in the backseat of the MSC van.

“What! We have to fit all our stuff into that little thing!”

Asco-fix-em! Quick thinking and improvising are key for successful field work: if your tool breaks, patch it together with some seaweed!

Professor Bracken and our guide, Deb, deploy the CTD at our open ocean sampling site

We barely had a boat ride where we didn’t see one or both of these. It was seriously magical. (photo credit: Sam Csik)

Right: Sand covering a head of Siderastrea siderea. Each point is a different grain of sand. (credit: Janine Ledet & Kali Horn) Left: sediment infiltrating the polyps of a Montastrea cavernosa. The arrows show the movement of one grain of sand, proving that corals can direct the movement of foreign substances. (credit: Andrea Burton & Joelle Kilchenmann)

Kylla and Brendan working on the shed – almost done!

Rainbow of colors seen in full spectrum (left) and with two types of red/green deficit: protanopia (middle) and deuteranopia (right). Images from wikipedia.

Just some of the contents of our lab’s outdoor storage shed… the “scientific equipment” we marine ecologists use.

View of the Bay of Fundy from a beautiful coastal trail in Quoddy Head State Park

Catherine celebrating the big day (right) with her father and sister. Brendan (left) starting his defense presentation.

Thanks to research in China, the proteins that make these jellies light up can now make your ice cream glow!

Pottery shards are likely from an ancient sieve, used in the step to strain the solid curds from the liquid whey.

Tiniest spoon EVER!

Small (left) gel rigs hold about 1/3 the number of samples of a large (right) gel rig.

Waves like this make diving a bit dangerous

Castle Rock on a calm day at East Point.

1856 portrait of Mr. Verne. All sea captains should have such a beard
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jules_Verne.gif

Old-timey maps add gravitas to any explanation.

My lost and found glasses! Now part of the marine debris sculpture!

One of Maria’s many beautiful illustrations: search her name to see more!

Pit Organs have thousands of nerve endings that can sense temperature changes of less than a thousandth of a degree.

Fish printing on t-shirts is a great way to show off your artistic talents!

The light grey mud is presumpscot – glacial till!

Left to right / top to bottom: Make shift field lab in Darling Center Cabin, make shift field lab in the field (!), Maine-ly Meat Restaurant, Acadia NP, Alewife fish ladder in Damariscotta, ME, grass roll, and sunset.

Me and Pinar at the Ankara Half Marathon.

Barnacles entombed in ice

A comparison of heatmaps made using some common color schemes: red, black and green (top left), default heatmap colors in R yellow to red (middle left) and red & blue (bottom left), along with their corresponding simulation for red/green deficit on the right.

Chris and Mariah dazzle students with fun facts about lobsters, crabs and snails!

Sand dollar and sea urchin test – pen and ink

I thought students might be squeamish about the fish – but they loved it!

The Vollmer Lab at STRI! I promise that water bottle will be out by the time experiments begin but it’s important to stay hydrated while moving heavy boxes and dodging cockroaches the size of small rodents.

Front view of RoboLobster

My new shiny Dell! Did I mention it was touch screen! Hello 21st century!

Right: Sand covering a head of Siderastrea siderea. Each point is a different grain of sand. (credit: Janine Ledet & Kali Horn) Left: sediment infiltrating the polyps of a Montastrea cavernosa. The arrows show the movement of one grain of sand, proving that corals can direct the movement of foreign substances. (credit: Andrea Burton & Joelle Kilchenmann)

Ice layer in the high intertidal

Students reference their self-made field guides to ID species during a rocky shore survey on Georges Island

This should probably be marine themed, but… well, feel free to imagine it is a spiny fish…

The Sea Education Campus (SEA) in Woods Hole, MA, where the retreat was located. Photo: patricialapadula.com

Runners stopping for water during the 2012 Boston Marathon. Photo: hunffingtonpost.com

This sign is no joke, those seals are huge! And they can move faster than you think…

Geoffrey Mutai finishing the 2011 Boston Marathon. His time of 2 hours 3 minutes and 2 seconds set a new record of the fastest marathon ever. (Photo: http://www.npr.org)

Volunteer Scientist with The Science Club for Girls

A real live nautilus! In the aquarium at California Academy of Sciences

Weighing a sample on the microbalance

Filtering water in the back of the MSC van!

A clear, penetrable membrane seals the body cavity of the lobster, but still allows blood to be taken as needed.

Boo!!

Don’t mind us, just destroying some echinoderm innocence.

Thin layer of ice coating Fucus

In case you were wondering, this is Comet Pan-Starrs. Thanks to Boston light pollution, it was not visible to the naked eye in Framingham. http://www.space.com/20056-comet-panstarrs-march-night-sky.html

Littorine snails congregate on the scarce rocky refuges of the primarily sandy beaches of Costa Rica.

No words.

Lugging these around is my exercise for the day

Also this happened. That’s King Sebastian, our fearless boat driver and all around hero.

Steps to perfect blancmenge: 1) dry harvested irish moss and while waiting 2) teach an old dog new tricks and 3) take sexy seaweed shots. 4) Gather supplies. 5) Warm milk with chosen ingredients and irish moss. Once the ‘gel’ has been released from the seaweed 5) strain and put into individual serving cups. Let set overnight in the refrigerator and enjoy!

Grab sampler (front) and corer ready for use!

The proportion of megabytes for “Graduate School” and for “Everything Else”

Holy Man, Mexico. Photo: Jason deCaires Taylor. Unfortunately, this isn’t likely to be an efficient way to grow A. cervicornis… they need more room – but I will be interested to see how this looks in 1-2 years.

Left to right: Scuba smurf inspects survey gear, Christine Newton sets up a transect line for survey